The Gimcrack Miscellany

Posted under gaming, science, video

I have been inspired by the 4th of July to post about fire-related phenomena, seeing as how millions of (probably drunk) people are about to shoot dangerous bombs into the sky. Remember the movie Backdraft? Can you believe that came out 17 years ago?!? I was pretty into that movie back in the 90s and I felt like revisiting the subject today.

Backdrafts were featured in the film by the same name. We all know what a backdraft is by now. All the oxygen is consumed and there are no longer flames but everything is still so hot that any new oxygen introduced to the fire will rapidly expand and splode real big. Lets turn to the video evidence.

I thought that was pretty cool. But then I learned of flashovers, which are indeed cooler - or hotter, depending on your preferred level of literalness. What happens is, in an enclosed room (similar conditions to a backdraft) a fire gives off hot smoke which radiates heat onto all the surfaces in the room. Once all of these surfaces get to around 1000 degrees, they expel flammable gases which ignite, along with every surface in the room. All at the same time. That’s tight.

Read more about flashovers and then feast on these yummy youtubez.

The flashover in this one happens at 1:15:

This one happens right away and the rest of the video is garbage:

But wait, let’s take it one step further. What happens when a flashover occurs OUTDOORS? An eff’n firestorm. That’s right. A storm made out of: fire. Is fire even a thing to be made out of? I’m starting to get confused and overwhelmed and scared.

Firestorms are rare as a dang two-headed kid. They happen usually in nature during wildfires. But we have managed to set buildings and stuff on fire in the past that are capable of producing them too. I want you to visit teh wicky on firestorms and think about them for a minute. Here is the first sentence: “A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system.”

!!!!!!!!11!!1!1one

Here are some firestorms that resulted from fires us humans made: The Great London Fire (1666), The Great Chicago Fire (1871), The Oakland Firestorm (1991), and the one created by the atomic bomb in Heroshima.

So we have this comparison: backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls -WAIT wha??? Fire whirls?!?

Yes, fire whirls. They exist. And they are coming to get you. According to Wikipedia, a fire whirl is a phenomenon in which a fire acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. You may wonder how this happens. Me too, but I figured it out on my own: Lucifer.

Just listen to the following sentence and then I’m done with my tirade on fire whirls:

“An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.”

When you go to bed tonight I want you to think of “a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in 15 minutes” and I guarantee you will have dreams about fire, featuring scenes with Kurt Russell and Donald Sutherland.

I believe that was recorded in Mordor.

Wow, that looked really windy. And fiery angered evil.

So our final tally is backdrafts < flashovers < firestorms < fire whirls < flame hurricanes - WAIT, wha?!?

I know they exist. I have seen them with my mind.

Posted under current events, religion, video

At least, that’s what they think. The Westboro Baptist Church is protesting across from the convention center, which is where the Southern Baptist Convention is being held this week. They’re the ones with the God Hates Fags website.

I saw them on my way to work this morning. There’s even a little kid out there holding a sign that says “Your Pastor Is A Whore”. I’m really just amazed at how they have managed to hate everyone in the world. Here is a list of people they hate: homosexuals, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Chinese, Canadians, Mexicans, Swedes, Irish, British, and Americans. Now, the WBC, which calls itself Baptist, hates Southern Baptists.

I just think the WBC is a good case study for people who are trying to grow their church and reach out to people. They’ve got it going on, in my opinion, and I think in the end it will work.

I have one more thought about these picketers. I noticed that there were about 6 protesters and about 9 police officers standing behind them, making sure no one throws a molotov cocktail directly at their eyes and faces. Do you realize how much of a waste of resources this is? There are 9 police officers, earning their well deserved $28k per year, who have been effectively incapacitated and removed from the system in order to make sure no one kills these people.

I guarantee you a crime will be committed against a person somewhere out there today that would not have happened if those extra 9 cops were on patrol.

Of course, there will also be 9 less speeding tickets given out. Maybe the WBC isn’t so bad after all…

Check out this short preview clip of a BBC documentary called The Most Hated Family In America:

“Fags eat feces. That’s a fact, hon.” REALLY? Wow.

Here’s the whole documentary:

Posted under gimcrackery, humor, l33t, photos

…but sometimes cynicism equals hilarity.

Here is some partly cynical, mostly hysterical junk I found on the web over the past couple days. First we’ll start with my favorite t-shirt designs from Busted Tees (I wouldn’t waste my time on that site if I were you). If you don’t understand them all, you must not spend 8 hours a day on the interwebs like me. That is probably a good thing.

I hate when people wear t-shirts with clever pop culture references because they’re usually not funny and they become outdated and stale in like a month. So basically I found the following fresh gems in a sea of moldy cliches.

Let’s see, there are 9 of these, so how about we go least funny to most funny? That’s fun because then I get to force my opinion upon you.

I’ve seen this before but I forgot how funny that guy looks.

I need to wear this shirt because every time I try to make fun of someone I make an even dumber mistake myself.

It’s funny because the hat loosely resembles the shape of Canada. Clever.

Same reason as the previous one, except the word “beard” is slightly funnier than the word “hat”.

I can see never forgetting William Wallace, MLK Jr., or Mother Theresa. But dinosaurs didn’t really teach us any lessons and weren’t really valiant or courageous. So never forgetting them is absurdly funny!

So very true. LOL!

If you don’t get this, I’m sorry. If you do, you’re welcome. I’ll let you try to find out for yourself what hilarious new viral video this is referring to.

Gah! The Shredder!

The poor guy is completely square. And they pointed it out!

Alright, now that we’ve properly offended Mexicans, Canadians, Wyomingites, and fans of Bill O’Reilly, we’ll proceed to the REALLY funny stuff. I’m serious, the second half of this post is way more funny than the first half. Ever seen DEmotivational posters? You can see a bunch of them at despair.com which are all SFW. I got most of the following demotivationals from other NSFW sites which I won’t list here.

Here is cynicism at its finest, and most hilarious. Most of these speak for themselves and require no commentary from the peanut gallery, so I’ll spare you. There’s 12 of ‘em, ranked pretty funny to really funny.

Finally, someone so eloquently put into words why I don’t want to use Linux!

OK, these are starting to veer from the “motivational poster” motif to the “make fun of people” motif, but that’s funny too. This picture can’t be real! What’s sad is I sometimes willingly go to Broad Ripple on Friday nights and surround myself with tools just like these. Does that make me a tool?

Anyway, hilarious!

These last few are by far the funniest. We’re moving away from dumb people and into the realm of awesome people. It’s funny for the same reason Chuck Norris jokes are funny.

This was the funniest to me by far. Some poor guy tries to make a demotivational poster about harpoons: “HARPOONS - Man Them” (not sure why that’s funny, but it doesn’t matter). Little did he know he was about to spark a bitter war of ignorance amongst his fellow demotivators. The second guy comes along with a good point: “FAIL - Missiles are NOT harpoons.” That’s already a funny demotivational right there.

But wait! Here comes the third guy, obviously a navy veteran, to correct the second guy with his intellect and wit! “I know even more than the both of you” he says. “It’s a Harpoon Missile, duh.” Haha! LOL! Even funnier! But it’s not over…

Guy #4 gets the last laugh. He gloriously rips apart the third guy’s grammar. Brilliant! “Double” only has one “B”! I love it! I bet he had like 6 people proof read it to make sure it was completely correct so he wouldn’t get ripped in yet another recursively hilarious picture. I guess I could get him for not putting the “B” at the end of his sentence in quotations, but that would be the pot calling the kettle black, so I’ll abstain.

Posted under blogging, sports

I was reading this post about salt tablets taken during long distance running on this blog about running and started thinking to myself, “why do you need salt if you run for a long distance?” This prompted me to click on the website for S!Caps where I kept seeing the words like sodium, potassium, and phosphate, which all seemed to be underneath the umbrella of electrolytes. Isn’t an electrolyte just a gimmick to get us to buy Gatorade? Isn’t the BEST drink just pure water? Don’t we just like sports drinks because they taste better than water?

I consulted The Oracle to see what indeed an electrolyte was, if our bodies really needed them, and, if so, where we could get more of them when we’re running out. If you are a person who runs marathons you already know all of this. If you are a person who prefers Seinfeld marathons while eating peanut butter out of the jar with a large serving spoon, this can actually be interesting.

The Oracle told me that both muscle tissue and neurons are considered electric tissues, and that these tissues are activated by electrolyte activity. Muscle contraction is dependent on calcium, sodium, and potassium, which are all ions that make up an electrically conductive medium, or an electrolyte. What I get out of that is, without electrolytes our muscles can’t form movements and our neurons can’t form thoughts. OK, so we definitely need them.

Do we lose them when we exercise? Not normally. But if we participate in such activities as Ironman events or ultramarathons we do, or else we risk water intoxication - also called water poisoning or overhydration. What? Water intoxication? Why didn’t anyone tell me!

No, it’s not what you think. I didn’t say you could get drunk from water. I said you could be poisoned to death and explode. There’s a difference. It happens if you drink huge amounts of water to make up for lost fluids (as you should do if you are an Ironman-er) without also replacing your supply of electrolytes. It turns out that during extended periods of exercise, if you consume a lot of water to make up for lost fluids, you can get water intoxication due to lack of elecrolytes.

So, is Gatorade really good during exercise? Yes. Are S!Caps even better? Absolutely. But since you don’t lose a significant amount of electrolytes unless you run around the world twice in one day, the normal person doesn’t have to worry about it. The best thing for you would be plain old water. So what was the point of me telling you all this if you’re never going to run a marathon in your life? Just in case you decide to get in a water drinking contest and die.

I guess it’s true what they say: too much of anything will kill you. Except LOLcats that is.

Posted under music, video

There’s something about musical prodigies that can cause me to waste an entire work day on Youtube. Today is Friday and I stayed up far past my bedtime last night. That means today is one of those days. I have compiled an assortment of videos for your viewing pleasure.

Today’s theme is Flight of the Bumblebee by Rinsky-Korsakov. There’s a point in every musician’s life when they discover that their fingers (or mouth in the case of wind/brass instruments) are able to move at speeds above human comprehension. Once a piece of music is memorized, the fingers are eventually able to play it as if they were autonomous. That is to say, the musician performs the song unconsciously.

I too have experienced the bliss of whizzing through a series of notes at lightning speed (way faster than they’re supposed to be played) and thinking I was invincible. That was before I saw the following videos.

We’ll start at amazing and work our way up to uber-amazing.

That was Flight of the Bumblebee on a good old fashion piano by a guy named Maksim. I estimate about 1% of the world’s population can do or has done this already. I mean, pianos are pretty common, right?

Let’s take it up a notch.

That was Luis Moreno on electric guitar. I estimate about 0.1% of the world’s population can pull that off. I realize guitars are even more common than pianos, but let’s put the amazingness of this in perspective. I played piano for 5 years and was at the point where I could probably play this piece on piano - although not quite as fast as Maksim did it. I’ve been playing guitar for twice as long and there isn’t a chance in heck that I could even attempt to play the first 2 seconds of Moreno’s version.

Hungry for more? It gets even better.

That was David Childs on the euphonium. I estimate about .00001% of the world’s population could achieve what Childs achieves. Why? Because there can’t be more than 30 euphoniums in the entire world. What is a euphonium?

OK, now get ready to step into the big leagues.

That was Jose Feliciano on acoustic/classical guitar. I know what you’re thinking. Let me explain to you why this is better than you think. 2 reasons. First, did you see at the end how he continued playing notes above the highest frets of the guitar? If you don’t know what a fret is, don’t fret. Just watch for the part at the very end where both of his hands are on the base of the guitar and he’s playing the strings above the hole of the guitar. Yeah, that’s impossible. Second - and this one’s gonna convince you if the first one didn’t - Jose Feliciano is blind. BLIND I TELL YOU! That means he makes those huge jumps of 10+ frets at a time using only his mind.

Seriously though, those videos were nothing compared to this next one. Hold on to your butts.

That was Alexander Dmitriev on accordian. Why is that awesome? Because he could whoop anyone at Guitar Hero. It doesn’t need much more explanation than that.

You might as well have just started reading this post right here, because everything you’ve just seen is meaningless compared to this next video.

That’s Greg Pattillo on flute. That’s right, he just beatboxed Flight of the Bumblebee. All my goals and dreams have just been shattered. I am no longer inspired to be the best at anything ever again.

Since I loved that video so much, here’s one last bonus video because I’m feeling very beneficent and magnanimous since it’s Friday. It’s the same guy doing one of my favorite musical suites: Peter and the Wolf. BEATBOX STYLE.